“You just can’t walk in and say, ‘We’re going to cut waste – there may be some waste, I’m sure there is – but it’s tiny.’ We’re talking about billions and billions of dollars here, and you don’t find that kind of waste. ‘And, well, I’m going to find efficiencies’ – I wish you could,” the mayor said. “You go and negotiate with unions that will not give up their pension funds or their health benefits.”

“You can’t get retroactive productivity increases, so there should not be retroactive savings,” he said. “I don’t know of any business; I don’t know of any of our taxpayers who get retroactive raises. The truth of the matter is a lot of our taxpayers have suffered from being laid off.”